Monday, August 13, 2007

and another

Stephen Glover nails the slight weirdness of the case against Channel 4's Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque - unless the programme-makers spliced stuff together to put words into the Muslim clerics' mouths that they didn't actually say (and I'm pretty sure no-one's suggesting they did) then the accusation boils down to the programme-makers giving an unbalanced view by editing out all the non-inflammatory stuff about the mosque newsletter, how the fund-raising for the new roof was going and how fundamentally nice and adorable kittens and fluffy rabbits are, in favour of focussing on all that other stuff they just happened to say about beheading people, stoning homosexuals to death, beating and oppressing women, etc.

Either you have TV programmes that are 73 hours long, or some editing of footage is required; it's called journalism. I'm sure the police's motives were good, but there's a danger, post-Lawrence, of bending over backwards not to be seen to be racist to the extent that your collective head disappears up your collective arse.

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